Episodes

  • Episode #98: Shane Mitchell

    Episode #98: Shane Mitchell
    Nov 1 2024
    Shane Mitchell is the author of the book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots, which is a history of food in the American South, often reflecting on her family’s three centuries of history on Edisto Island, South Carolina connects with it. While told through stories that center around 11 different crops, the book isn’t directly about food, but how we center it as a way to understand cycles of life. All of the stories in the book, except for one, were originally published in The Bitter Southerner, a brilliant magazine and website about the South. It has some of the most beautiful writing anywhere in it and despite having little to do with the south I read it regularly.

    Shane lives in upstate New York and is the Editor at Large for Saveur, which is now back in print and absolutely deserves your support. She also writes for The New York Times and is the author Far Afield: Rare Food Encounters from Around the World, a book about her travels around the world while profiling the stewards of the world's traditional foodways and it also features beautiful photos and recipes. She is a many times James Beard award winner and one of my favorite writers anywhere, so I was really excited to have this extended conversation with her.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Episode #97: Sabor Barranquilla

    Episode #97: Sabor Barranquilla
    Oct 11 2024
    Rather than a straight forward interview, this episode is a report from on the ground in Barranquilla, Colombia during the city’s annual gastronomy festival, Sabor Barranquilla. The 17th edition of the festival occurred at the end of August and we were there to capture the sounds of the city and speak with local cooks, event organizers and people in the street, while exploring the region’s diverse cuisine, from Lebanese restaurants to fried street snacks and corozó wine.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    32 mins
  • Episode #96: Gilberto Briceño

    Episode #96: Gilberto Briceño
    Sep 27 2024
    Gilberto Briceño is the owner of RLT Cuisine, or Road Less Traveled Cuisine, in Playa Potrero, a small beach town in Guancaste, Costa Rica. RLT Cuisine is not a restaurant, but it’s also not not a restaurant. There is a restaurant element to it. Inside his food lab in a commercial building, nowhere near the beach, he has 4 seats inside of the main kitchen. Whenever someone wants to come in, he creates a 9-course meal out of local ingredients for them. But that is just a small fraction of what RLT Cuisine is. It's outdoor pop-up dinners in wild settings, a private chef service, product development, cooking classes and storytelling.

    Gilberto spent years staging at some of the best restaurants in the world, learning both the wrong way and the right ways to run a kitchen. He saw the toll that high level kitchens could take on a cook, but that it didn’t have to be that way. Not only is his concept for RLT Cuisine adaptable, going with the flow and making whatever idea work within its boundaries and the limits of the business, but it is kind. There are staff meals provided by a local cook and the idea that everyone working there has equal value.

    Social media is also an important part of what Gilberto does. His Tiktok videos are great and should be a reference for any small culinary business. They are less of an advertisement about the business and more of just a way for people to stumble onto the way he thinks, which in turn helps his business. It’s also a way to deepen knowledge of cuisine in the area. This is a part of Costa Rica that’s near a Blue Zone, one of just a handful of places on earth where people live the longest because of the local diet, but the widespread development along the coast over the last 10 years is wiping it away even as they market the very concept of blue zones. I have been spending a lot of time in Costa Rica over the past decade and it’s a really special place with a complicated history that I can’t really equate to anywhere else. It has the greatest network of accessible small farms in the region, while also having industrial farms that have some of the world’s highest rates of pesticide use. There are incredible local restaurants called sodas, while there are also more terrible, overpriced, ill-conceived tourist restaurants that don’t use local ingredients than anywhere I can think of. Anyway, Gilberto and his pura vida vibes is someone that can help shift the momentum.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Episode #95: María Álvarez

    Episode #95: María Álvarez
    Sep 13 2024
    María Álvarez is the co-founder, along with Isaac Martínez, of the publisher Novo, the very first publishing house dedicated to gastronomy in Mexico. Maria and Isaac started Novo in 2023 because they saw a lack in the types of books being published about Mexican cuisine, both in Mexico and abroad. The wanted to be a publisher that is more collaborative with other disciplines, more like a milpa. Rather than just a monoculture of corn, they wanted a multicropped garden of designers, photographers and other professionals to help support the vision of the author. In this interview she explains how she moved from the world of art publishing into culinary publishing and is helping shape a community around these niche books about food in Mexico, as well as through their podcast series, Radio Milpa.
    Novo now has published two books. The first is Cocina de Oaxaca, by Alejandro Ruiz, published last year. Ruiz is the chef of Casa Oaxaca, who is one of the godfathers of modern Oaxacan cooking and has helped teach in a generation of cooks at his restaurant Casa Oaxaca. They also just released Estado de Hongos, a book about mushrooms in central Mexico by the Mexican Japanese forager by Nanae Watabe. She supplies mushrooms to lots of the best restaurants in the DF and is at the intersection of all things mushrooms in Mexico and the book reflects that. This October, they will be publishing La República Democrática del Cerdo, by Pedro Reyes, who you might know from the Taco Chronicles on Netflix. You can order them online or find them in bookstores in Mexico, as well as buy some of the books on Amazon in the U.S. or at incredible culinary bookstores like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York and Now Serving in Los Angeles.

    This world of publishing culinary books in Latin America is really beginning to open up and I couldn’t be happier. I think a healthy publishing environment is one where a lot of different voices and aesthetics are being developed and not just that of a few large international publishers. In the interview we discuss how important the very language being used in a culinary book can be.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Episode #94: Rodrigo Pacheco

    Episode #94: Rodrigo Pacheco
    Aug 30 2024
    A lot of chefs say they want to preserve landscapes, but Rodrigo Pacheco of Bocavaldivia in Puerto Cayo on the coast of Ecuador at is actually doing it. He is literally acquiring land and re-wilding it, in the hopes of turning it into the world’s largest biodiverse edible forest.

    I first met the guy about 10 years ago at a conference in Quito. At the time, all the contemporary Ecuadorian chefs were trying to get international attention and get on lists and get famous. Then there was Rodrigo, who could care less about those things. It was still early on this project on a remote beach, but he was already talking about connecting with nature and utilizing biodiversity. He seemed totally out of place. It was still early in the life of Bocavaldivia. The 100 hectares of land he bought, a former pepper farm, was heavily degraded. Much of the surrounding tropical dry forest was cut down. There was little wildlife there. But in a decade, he has turned it into a thriving landscape, which, through the accrual of new land, now reaches up to the cloud forest. I was there earlier in the year and I saw it with my own eyes. He now uses more than 150 different edible plants from this landscape throughout the year on his menu.

    While the heart of Bocavaldivia is a restaurant, where he and his team cook from a rustic wood fired kitchen adapted from native ones, and serve tasting menus alongside nice wines, to call it just a restaurant would be lacking. The experience there involves a journey. Many hours before eating you start to experience the landscape. You traverse them by fishing in the sea and tasting termites off a stick and hiking through the trees. You connect with it before you sit down and eat. And when you do sit down, there isn’t some long, drawn out explanation of what you are eating, because you’ve lived it.

    Lots of other projects that spin out from Bocavaldivia. He has a restaurant in Quito called Foresta. He was on the Netflix cooking show The Final Table. He has created a mini-documentary series with indigenous leaders. He is a Goodwill Ambassador in Ecuador at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He started a foundation. He says because he lives in the middle of nowhere that he has a lot of extra time on his hands that most other chefs don’t. It’s funny how the less busy you are sometimes the more you can get done. I’m still trying to figure out how that works.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Episode #93: Lisa Abend

    Episode #93: Lisa Abend
    Aug 16 2024
    Lisa Abend is a Copenhagen, Denmark based writer that covers food, travel and all sorts of other topics for publications like Time Magazine, The New York Times and Fool, among others. She is the head of communications for the Copenhagen based non-profit Mad and the author of the 2011 book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli, where she spent a season at the restaurant documenting its team of stagieres and what else goes on behind the kitchen walls. She is one of the most respected voices in the world of gastronomy and it was a real pleasure to be able to speak with her.

    Recently, Lisa launched the Substack newsletter The Unplugged Traveler where she posts about going to destinations in Europe that she has never been before and, totally without any research prior to the trip, experiences them completely offline. That means no looking at her phone or the internet for recommendations or planning. For the most recent post her brother said she should go to Zadar, so she booked a flight there and went without even knowing what country it was in. It’s unlike any travel writing being done anywhere else and there isn’t a better moment for it. Travel, has lost much of its meaning since the advent of the smart phone. Everything is booked in advance. We seem to know everything about a destination before we get there and go armed with lists of recommendations on where to eat and drink and what to do and see. There is no room for surprise or discomfort of any sort. The same stories are being written repeatedly, which is leading to overwhelming swells of tourists in certain cities. We are seeing a backlash to that. Aside of limiting tourists from a destination, what can you do? One thing is to get back to the essence of travel and go to places where you can experience something new, some place where you can have your own experience. I didn’t ask her this but I hope she turns this project into a book one day.
    Lisa lived in Spain when El Bulli was still around, then moved to Copenhagen and got to see Noma’s rise. For a little while, she had another newsletter with some other Copenhagen based writers called Bord, which told in depth stories about the restaurant industry in that city, such as kitchen abuses and stagiares. Anyway, she has watched as those two restaurants, one right after the other, propelled by the oversized influence of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, have changed the conversation around fine dining and cuisine as a whole. We discuss if that will happen again. What will the next big thing be? Maybe it isn’t a fine dining restaurant. Maybe it’s not even a restaurant.

    Read more and find a transcript at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Episode #92: Gabriela Perdomo

    Episode #92: Gabriela Perdomo
    Aug 2 2024
    Gabriela Perdomo is the owner of the tortillería and restaurant El Comalote in Antigua, Guatemala. More than just a place to buy tortillas and eat delicious things with corn masa, the almost entirely female run El Comalote is a project that is helping resurrect the links between criollo corn and consumers in urban parts of Guatemala. Like in Mexico, as well as other neighboring countries, the majority of tortillas consumed are from industrial corn. Gaby explains how the technique of making tortillas by hand remains dominant in the country, the choice of corn has changed drastically. There has been a shift away from the more difficult to grow native varieties towards the varieties that all look the same, grow extremely fast and produce massive quantities. However, these are less nutritious and often need pesticides and other chemicals to survive.
    Since El Comalote opened in 2021, they have helped open the eyes of urban consumers and chefs in the country to the flavor of heirloom corn. I’ve been there a couple of times now and tasting these thick, brightly colored tortillas – red, green, orange, blue, black – shows how perfect of a food a great tortilla can be. You really don’t need much else. They also make other masa derived foods like tamales, cambrayes, chicha, chuchitos. and more. What’s important from this interview is to understand how Gaby has been able to do this. More than just getting the very best corn and paying them the highest price, she has listened to the indigenous farmers and their communities that she works with to try to understand their needs and concerns.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • Episode #91: Richard McColl

    Episode #91: Richard McColl
    Jul 19 2024
    Richard McColl is a British Canadian journalist, podcaster and hotel owner based in Bogotá and Mompós, Colombia. I’ve known Richard for at least a decade. I first knew of him from his work as a fellow foreign correspondent covering subjects all around Latin America, writing for international publications. In 2013, we met in person when I was writing for a story about Mompós for The New York Times. It’s one of my favorite stories I ever written for The Times because Mompós is such a special place. It’s this stunning 500-year-old colonial city on an island in the Magdalena River that was once a major port but was then mostly forgotten as that part of the river stilted up and war cut it off from society. It’s a strange, kind of mystical place with so much history and so many stories and quirky characters. It’s a place that was a big inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winning author and you can feel the imagery from his books everywhere there. Richard’s wife has family there and he was enchanted by it and ended up buying two of these colonial houses, which he turned into small hotels, La Casa Amarilla and San Rafael. We talk a lot about Mompós and its ghosts and how it’s much easier to reach than when I went there and had to take a 10-hour ride in a truck from Cartagena.

    While I was in Mompós he asked me if I wanted to be on a podcast he just launched, called Colombia Calling, where he interviews all kinds of subjects about Colombia, in English. This was in 2013, and it was probably one of the original podcasts anywhere in Latin America, and honestly, I hadn’t even listened to a podcast at that time. It’s still going and has now recorded more than 500 episodes. Juli was on a recent episode and they talk a lot about Colombian food and it’s a great listen.

    Richard also runs the Latin News Podcast and he recently started a small publishing company. They are books in English, about Colombia, and includes titles such as Better than Cocaine: Learning to grow coffee, and live, in Colombia, by the writer Barry Max Wills, and Richard has two books forthcoming, a general guide to politics, history and culture called Colombia at a Crossroads, and The Mompós Project, about his life in that incredible place and the stories he has gathered and witnessed. Anyway, it was great to catch up with Richard after all these years.
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    1 hr and 18 mins